CRYSTAL DRUM REVIEW OF QUALITY LIT &
RELATED FINE ARTS

We do run reviews of pretty much anything-- shorter is
better, though as the 'Key Of Z' review below indicates, longer
is a possibilty. If you're planning to go over 200 words it's
best to enquire first.

Again, most of the examples here are by your editor, but as permissions trickle in, we'll post stuff by other writers. Honest.

McSalad Shake ($2.50, at McDonalds) Or maybe
it's called a Salad McShake. But whatever the hell it' s called,
it's the GREATEST IDEA EVER. You get a salad in a big clear cup,
with a tightly fitting dome cap. You pour your dressing over the
salad, snap on the cap, and shake it up for about 30 seconds, and
EVERY FRAGMENT OF THE SALAD has dressing on it! I 've been
bringing the empty cups and caps home and then buying those BAGS
of salad at the supermarket and making my own McSalads. The first
life-changing innovation of the new millennium. Yeah!

About 38 years ago, or exactly 1000 years from now, depending
on how you look at it, The Legion of Super Heroes was the
back-of-the-book feature (the comic book equivalent of the bottom
half of a double bill) in Adventure Comics. Set in 3000 AD, the
Legion consisted of a dozen or so super-powered teenagers from
all over the solar system. The nominal leaders were Cosmic Boy
and Saturn Girl, but star power was provided by Superboy, who
could travel into the future by flying very quickly in tight
clockwise circles (and of course, counter clockwise to return to
the present). Even at the age of seven it was apparent to me that
the kids in the Legion were a bunch of snots. Not just any super
powere d teenager could get in; this exclusive clique held
regular auditions. Eventually, a bunch of the rejects banded
together as The Legion of Substitute Heroes. The one I remember
most vividly was Polar Boy, who was obviously rejected because he
was short. H is freeze-power was much more striking than the
powers of the regular members who blackballed him (I couldn't
tell you what Cosmic Boy's power was-- my best guess is that he
was boffing Saturn Girl, who had the power to make her breasts
defy gravity) .

The editors encouraged readers to send in ideas for teenage
superheroes who would audition for membership in the Legion.
These vignettes, a regular feature of the Legion stories, were
studies in humiliation; in one memorable panel-- and it really
was memorable, because I was present 10 years later when Chuck
Ward mentioned it one evening at the Park Theater and EVERY USHER
IN THE PLACE remembered it-- a kid carrying what looked to be a
large colander full of feathers and a bottle of Peptol-Bismol
tells the assembled Legion, "I have invented a formula which
makes feathers as heavy as lead." Saturn Girl gently (or
perhaps smirkingly) says "That's very impressive... but it's
not really super power ." Your heart just bled for the poor
guy, I swear.

Okay. If your favorite musical group of all time-- The Miles
Davis Quintet of 1960, The 1941 Ellington Orchestra, The Beatles,
whoever-- corresponds to the Legion of Super Heroes, and your
not-quite-faves-but-you-still-collect their-records-type bands
correspond to t he Substitute Legion, then that garage band
rehearsing behind the Pizza Place, those poor schmucks trying
desparately to figure out the chords to Come As You Are and
Glycerin but not quite nailing them-- they're the kid who can
make feathers as heavy as lead.

Now imagine that back (?) in the 30 th century there's some
clueless pimply kid with Coke bottle lenses who actually aspires
to be the guy with the lead-feather formula. He's been down in
his basement dumping vinegar and baking soda over a bowl of
feathers for two weeks with nothing happening except a lot of
pointless fizzling, but he takes a look at the soggy bubbling
mess, cries "YEAH!" and races down to the Legion Hall,
absolutely certain he's no more than 45 minutes away from a skin
tight lycra suit , a snappy nickname, the perpetual adulation of
the hoi polloi, and, with luck, a locker right next to Saturn
Girl's. What is the musical analog of this poor bastard?

Welcome to what Irwin Chusid, in his new book Songs in
the Key of Z, calls "...the curious universe of
Outsider Music, a mutant strain of twisted sonic art so wrong--
it's right." In twenty brief chapters we are introduced to a
wide variety of these folks -- they range from near-total naiffs
like The Shaggs and Wesley Willis to rogue jazz composer Robert
Graettinger and microtonal music pioneer Harry Partch.

The assorted outsiders come in a variety of flavors. There are
a pair of precursors, The Cherry Sisters (a sort of Ur-Shaggs)
and the tone-deaf soprano Florence Foster Jenkins. There are some
genuine schizophrenics, such as Wesley Willis and Wildman
Fischer; any number of drug casualties, most notably Syd Barrett;
and a whole slew of people who are totally uncategorizable . Most
of these people have never had anything resembling a recording
contract, though some have; most of them display a lack of
self-consciousness (or awareness), but some obviously know both
what they are doing and how it appears to the general public; and
A LOT of them are absolutely incapable of staying on the beat .
The Shaggs, Lucia Pamela, Eilert Pilarm, and B. J. Snowden have
especially interesting idea about just where the downbeat happens
to occur in any given bar of music, though they all have their
charms.

Inevitably, the portrait gallery begins to take on the aspect
of a freak show. Chusid is well aware of this and does what he
can to mitigate it, but there's only so much you can do when
you're writing about Wesley Willis, Wildman Fischer, and Shooby
Taylor the Human Horn. Some chapters (The Cherry Sisters, for
instance) are extensively researched and others are largely
persona l essays about how he first encountered and reacted to
the music of these artists. Both approaches work pretty well.
Though the book is often funny (sometimes laugh out loud funny),
few of these artists came / have come / will come to a happy end;
Chusid commendably does not downplay (or romanticize, which would
be worse) mental illness, which in the case of Wildman Fischer,
has manifested itself in such acts as hurling a wooden toy at
Frank Zappa's toddler son and shitting in a stranger's hall
closet. He a lso amply documents an unappealing bitterness and
sense of entitlement that many-- not all-- of these outsiders
share. He does not claim these outsiders are BETTER than the
folks with major label deals, only that they are different, and
worth hearing. And having heard them on the companion CD, I can
only say: You bet.

Chusid allows that we might question the inclusion of Partch
and Graettinger, whose work, however outre it is, can hardly be
called naive or unselfconscious, and of Florence Foster Jenkins.
I don't know Graettinger's work at all, but Partch, whose music
is quite delightful, is probably MORE accessible to ears attuned
to pop music than most 20th century classical composers. If some
people check out his music because of this book so much the
better; He's a colorful character and a genuine American
original.

If this were my book, I would have hesitated before including
any non-Americans at all; the assorted musical dysfunctions
chronicled here seem uniquely American to me, though perhaps
that's just my provincialism showing. After due consideration I
would have admitted two of the three fer'ners -- Swedish Elvis
"channeler" Eilert Pilarm and British record producer
Joe Meek, both of whom are virtually Artificial Americans. If,
pace William Carlos Williams, the pure products of America go
crazy, these impure products are not exactly poster children for
sanity. On the other hand, Pink Floyd founder Syd Barrett seems
to me quintessentially English. Syd is representing all the rock
music acid burnouts. Brian Wilson was rejected because, as Chusid
says in the intro, it's really hard to make a case for h im being
an outsider when his music-- even some of the very weirdest-- is
so ubiquitous it's practically in our DNA by now. I would have
gone with Skip Spence or (better) Roky Erikson, both of whom are
briefly treated in a concluding catchall chapter (Or Arthur Lee,
who isn't, though he gets a couple of passing mentions.) Syd is
here because Chusid really likes his music (and he writes about
it quite well) ( In fact, Chusid is the drummer on the Krystyna
Olsiewicz/R. Stevie Moore cover of Syd's "Baby
Lemonade.")

And though Bobby Vee's deplorable vocal version of
"Telstar" gets mentioned, Julius LaRosa's incredible
rendition, played over the credits of Mr. Mike's Mondo
Video does not. ???

AND he prints the cover of Bingo Gazingo's CD but NOT the
cover of Jessica Kane's Varicose Days.!!!

Most egregiously, Chusid does not show proper respect for Mel
Tormé.Otherwise his taste is pretty impeccable.

The companion CD, also entitled Songs in the Key of Z,
contains 14 tracks by various subjects of chapters in the book,
plus 6 tracks by people profiled in the concluding
"Snapshots in Sound" section. The CD is skewed much
more towards novelty and humor than the book-- no Partch, no
Graettinger, no Syd Barrett; many of the songs included are
mainstays of Chusid's "Incorrect Music" hour on WFMU.
It opens with "Philosophy of the World" by the Shaggs,
who sound like nothing else on God's Green Earth, and th en into
"Walking the Cow" by the unhinged but gifted Daniel
Johnson-- a really catchy number, expertly structured and weirdly
affecting; you can understand, if the rest of his songs are this
good, why half the bands in the country line up to cover his
stuff. Next up is Lucia Pamela's berserk "Walking on the
Moon" (there's a cow in that one, too), then Peter
Grudzien's gay reworking of Elton Brit's WWII era C&W
standard "Star Spangled Banner Waving Somewhere"
("Though I realize I'm homo that is true, sir / don't judge
me by my preference or sex/ Let me show Uncle Sam what I can do,
sir/ Let me help to bring the terrorists down a peg").

Then we move into the heart of the batting order: Jack
Mudurian, a nursing home resident whose only claim to greatness--
bu t it'll do-- is a spontaneous 45 minute, one hundred and
thirty song medley released on CD as "Downloading the
Repertoire." We get three and a half minutes here; the first
time I heard it, I nearly fell off my chair. Then Shooby Taylor,
"the world's most o riginal scat singer," works his
magic on 'Stout Hearted Men.' This is just WONDERFUL. No kidding.
(The book includes a side bar of some favorite Shoobyisms, such
as "la-dah-dah shree, lo poo pah" and "sidley
doot-in-doot splaw"). B. J Snowden, who gets my vote for
nicest person in the world on the basis of her chapter in the
book, delivers her paean to the folks in the Great White North,
"In Canada" ("In Canada/They treat you like a
queen/In Canada/They never will be mean"). No sooner has
this ended than Eilert Pilarm launches into "Jailhouse
Rock," a song he appears to have learned phonetically,
albeit none-too thoroughly ("You vas riddem section, uh, vas
ya purpoo la gang"). This one doesn't hold up to endless
repeating like some of the others, but the first few times it is
an absolute killer. Next up: a representative "song
poem"-- a professionally composed, arranged, and performed
setting of a staggeringly opaque lyric. ("...the Virgin
child of the Universe/Is swept up in her fierce drive of sex u al
encounters/Orgasmic explosion of love, enhances the child/ While
a floodgate of love circles throughout Saturnate..."). Then
300 pound schizophrenic Wesley Willis, composer of over 35,000
more or less identical songs, brings it home with "Rock N
Roll McDonalds."

And there's a lot more, much of it uproarious. The second
track from the end, however, "They Told Me I Was a
Fool," by someone named Jandek, made the hair stand up on
the back of my neck. Sung-chanted over an out-of-tune guitar (or
possibly it's differently tuned-- I got a similar (not identical)
sound on my 6 string using a DADGAD tuning, which is useful for
playing some kinds of modal music), this bizarre lyric--
"You got real fancy instincts /but your mouth is so large
..."--which I could not make sense of-- is utterly chilling.
I listened to it over and over for about a week and then sent for
a couple of this guy's CDs. I found them just as fascinating and
just as creepy. THREE TIMES I've had the CDs playing when friends
stopped by and THREE TIMES the reaction was: "What the fuck
are you listening to?" (And one guy simply said, "I'm
not into the blues." A reaction I occasionally get when
playing Captain Beefheart records, which leads me to conclude
that to folks who don't dig the blues, the blues sound like
Jandek and Captain Beefheart. But if so, why don't they LOVE the
blues??) Like IC says in the liner notes: "He isn't 'rock',
he isn't 'roll', he isn't even 'and.' " I plan to get all 28
Jandek masterpieces when time and cash flow allow. GO, CAT GO!

Which brings us to the question: Is it any good? Is ANY of
this stuff any good, or is it all just novelty songs by the
terminally clueless? All through the book Chusid quotes assorted
aficionados of the artists, and what most of them seem to respond
to is the 'authenticity' of the material. Another word that gets
thrown around a lot is 'sincerity.' But what does it mean to say
that Jandek or Captain Beefheart or Daniel Johnston is authentic?
Authentically what? I listen to the music I listen to
because I like the way it sounds. (On the other hand, context
does count for something. A legendary tale from the early days of
the NYU Science Fiction Society: Guy brings a Leonard Nimoy album
to a meeting. Everybody tells him to forget it, not even as a
joke will they listen to that shit. Put on the new Mothers of
Invention album. He says okay, puts the album on. Everyone is
amazed. Zappa has outdone himself! The most incredible music of
his career! Hilarious, yet moving. What's the name of that cut?
Turns out to be "Music to watch Space Girls By"-- the
lead off track on the Nimoy album). So I find myself asking:
would I buy a Daniel Johnston record if I found out that he was
really, say, Eric Carmen in a daffy mood?(Yeah, but not RETAIL.)

Some of these people are strictly novelty acts, but strange
things can happen in the music-- usually in the rhythm section,
for some reason-- and all of a sudden we're out of Dr. Demento
territory and Somewhere Else. Around 50 seconds into the
cacophony of the Legendary Stardust Cowboy's "Standing in a
Trash Can" he bellows "Yeah, my baby found me in a
trash can in some back alley in New York !" and for
a few bars this band sounds for all the world like a close cousin
to the early Modern Lovers or the first configuration of the
Velvet Underground. The CD abounds with these moments.

Two things come to mind to explain this sort of thing: One is
an anecdote in A. B. Spellman's Four Lives in the Bebop Business,
(recounted by Lester Bangs in Psychotic Reactions and
Carburetor Dung: A guy with a double bass walks in off
the street and asks Cecil Taylor if he can jam. Taylor says okay,
and the guy gets on stage. After a couple of moments, Taylor
realized the guy didn't know how to play, didn't even know how to
hold the instrument, he'd just decided he was going to play.
"He just explored as a child would, pursuing songs or
evocative sounds through the tangles of his ignorance. And after
a while, Taylor said, he began to hear something coming out,
something deeply felt and almost but never quite controlled,
veering between a brand new type of song which can't be taught
beca use it comes from unschooled innocence... and chaos...
Something was beginning to take shape which, though erratic, was
unique in all this world." THAT'S what I hear in The Shaggs,
Beefheart, Jandek, and some of the others. Sorta, kinda.

The other thing is one of e.e. cumming's 'five simple facts no
sub/human superstate ever knew': "first rate and second
implies nonthinkable enormousness by contrast with the tiny
stumble from second to tenth." Perhaps there is a
nonthinkable enormousness between the 10 th and 11th rate, too,
and most of us are as incapable of sinking below the 10th as we
are of rising into the 1st . There are clearly some fascinating
things in the chthonic depths, just as there are in the celestial
heights.

The final cut on the CD belongs to Tiny Tim, dueting on Cole
Porter's "True Love" with his last wife, Miss Sue. It's
quite charming, though just about anything would be a relief
after Jandek. (There's actually another song between them, but my
brain is so fried after listening to "They Told Me..."
that I still haven't been able to listen to it with any kind of
attention). Once you read the book, though, it becomes really
moving. While Tiny is surely the most famous fig ure in the book
(his closest competitor in this regard is probably Captain
Beefheart), and while I was aware of the bare outlines of his
rags-to-riches-to-rags story, I didn't realize he put out
something like 15 albums in the last decade of his life, work ing
incessantly to the end-- he literally dropped dead on stage.
Well, like many of the people in this book, he could no more stop
performing than he could stop producing carbon dioxide. The world
is full of has-beens playing Holiday Inns for chump change, and
churning out records on tiny labels in the hope that lightning
will strike again. But Tiny seems to have done this without
bitterness or self pity. Who'd have thought this walking sight
gag would soldier on for 30 years after his star fell, not
complaining, playing to any audience that would sit still for him
and doing his damnedest to give them their money's worth?Don't
miss this one.

In this issue, published at the height of DC's
appalling "Go-Go Checks" era, Jimmy and long-time girl
friend Lucy Lane finally decide to tie the knot, but spurned 5th
dimensional imp Miss Gzplsnz (disguised as Supergirl) gives Lucy
a magic lipstick; each time Lucy kisses Jimmy while wearing this
stuff, Superman turns into a giant super mole, and finds himself
compelled to burrow through the earth. Lots of celebrity s tudded
vignettes along the way-- for instance, Jimmy bops briefly into
the future so he can tell the girls in the Legion of Super Heroes
that he's about to remove himself from the ranks of eligible
bachelors, which he does with his usual sensitivity: "Fasten
your seat belts, chicks. I have some bad news for you..."
But of course it's the giant super mole material that make this
ish indelible.

Writing this AS THE EVENT UNFOLDS... Swimsuit
competition underway right now, 10:35 PM... best boobs, Miss
Arkansas...Miss N.J. a little on the SCRAWNY SIDE... A MAD RAPIST
is STALKING co-host KATHIE LEE GIFFORD, and we will be right
here, letting you know WHAT HAPPENS AS IT HAPPENS... Miss South
Carolina singing "Summertime" from Porgy & Bess..
gorgeous face, and the girls are doing THEIR OWN HAIR &
MAKE-UP this year... Miss Georgia tap dancing to "Mack the
Knife." Her black tights and shoes blend right into the
background and you can't hear her taps over the amplified music,
but the Atlantic City audience digs it... 11:01 PM...No mad
rapist yet... Kathie Lee showing no signs of INCREDIBLE STRESS
she must be under, God bless her... By my count she has the 5th
best bod on stage right now, and these chicks have all got like
20, 25 years on her... And yet, SOME PEOPLE professed to be
SHOCKED when Kathie Lee WON TV GUIDE READERS' POLL as the MOST
BEAUTIFUL WOMAN ON TELEVISION... Miss Alabama dancing to Duke
Ellington's "The River". Shedding beads from her
costume as she twirls. Deliberately?... Miss Hawaii hula dancing.
Jesus Christ... Not even dancing, just sort of moving her arms
& hips ALMOST in time to the music... 11:27... Talent comp.
over. MY PICKS: Miss Alabama (dance); Miss Wisconsin (violin);
Miss South Carolina (good song); Miss Oregon (crummy song, from
Chess , but she really sold the bastard...) ...I fell asleep...
Judges conferring... Time running out for MAD RAPIST to show
up... unless he showed up wh ile I was asleep and KATHIE LEE TOOK
HIM OUT... with maybe, I dunno, one of those little chick-type
guns... perspiration glistening on the TOP OF SOMEBODY'S BOOB...
the winner is...ZZZZZ...[note: MAD RAPIST caught a week or so
later, nowhere nearKathie Lee...]